Framing and Voting

CompText 2023

Nicolai Berk

Humboldt Universität Berlin

12.05.2023

How Does Media Content Affect Voting Behaviour?

Issue Ownership

Source: Conservatives Website

Source: Labour Website

Emphasis Framing

Empirical Strategy

Measuring Media Framing


  1. Collect 2.5M News Articles.
  2. Identify migration content with supervised BERT model.
  3. Generate document embeddings for migration articles.
  4. Cluster embeddings into topics using top2vec.

BERT Performance


Metric Score
Accuracy 0.96
Precision 0.94
Recall 0.93
F1-Score 0.94

Validation Frame Estimates

Document Level

Monthly Aggregation

Topic Distribution over Time

Party Performance

Estimating Effects on Party Performance


Inferential: RDD

Exploit events creating discontinuities in migration coverage.


Descriptive: VAR

Assess over-time correlation of frames and party polls.

Preliminary Results

Tragedy off Lampedusa: Media Effect

Tragedy off Lampedusa: Media Effect

Parndorf Incident: Media Effect

Parndorf Incident: Polling Effect

VAR

Next Steps



  • Currently waiting for daily opinion polls from forsa-Bus.
  • Add control variables (esp. immigration numbers).

Thank you!


This research is generously supported by:

Nicolai Berk | Framing and Voting